


bottle up the sea breeze

by York



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Beach Sex, Fugitives AU kind of, Future Fic, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Post-Canon, Pynch Week, canon-typical magician-ness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 13:42:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11670261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/York/pseuds/York
Summary: Adam scries into the damn ocean, Ronan worries, and they both come to decisions.





	bottle up the sea breeze

**Author's Note:**

> filling the Pynch Week 2017, Day 3 prompt "What are you doing here?" with a word tweak. this is part of some possible future where hunters haven't forgotten about the Greywaren, and the Lynches can't get a moment of peace in their lives, so Adam and Ronan go, together. everyone else is safe. i may pick up on parts of this setting for future works, but for now, happy pynch week!
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://ellipsesetcetera.tumblr.com/). also, title from [The Summer by Josh Pyke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1jonRDIkFE). (i fancy it's about the post-trk-epilogue summer.)

The first wave to touch Adam's toes was a shock; a cold, shivering, salty rush of seawater that dragged shells and sand dollars and kelp onto the shore and parted around his legs.

He skirted the tide, heels digging into the sand as he stepped backward, the foaming white bubbles popping briefly against his ankles before receding. It was a forgotten kind of thrill, refreshing in his memory — he hadn't felt this _free_ despite everywhere they'd been, everywhere they'd traveled. Felt what it was like to stand on a beach and wait for the water to take him. When it was gone, and the wind whistled against his skin, Adam wished for it back.

At this hour, the night air filled his lungs but sighed an unforgivable chill. Adam wore only the clothes he'd slept in, having slipped out of his sleeping bag beside Ronan as soon as his dreams had begun to grow trees from his freckles. His veins were the roots, the standing hairs on his arms: the leaves. He was woken by the oddity of the dream, and from the sureness that it had meant something.

When he'd blinked open his eyes, the sound of breaking waves greeted him. It rose and fell in cyclic roaring noise and immense quiet, and at first, he'd thought that the foreign rhythm of it was what pulled him from sleep. A leafy whispering in his deaf ear, a familiar and understanding presence, told him otherwise.

Adam could stand here all night and take in the view, but he had a job to do. He looked below where the ocean dipped boundlessly into the horizon, staring into the tumultuous blackness skimmed by pale yellow moonlight, and concentrated until it opened up and let his mind fall through.

Scrying into odd things was a game now. What flickering neon sign could push him farther this time, what puddle created by the rain could drag him under. The Atlantic Ocean was a new one. It took some time to wrap his head around it, and then to focus it down to a point. Eventually he saw himself, from afar, the thin layer of water curling around him and sinking his feet further into the sand, but he couldn't feel it. He could only feel the ley line, the beating vein full of souls that were as many as the grains of sand on the beach.

Cabeswater had something for him. It always had something for him. With its rebirth, it manifested as a new and childish and ancient storyteller. But it took to approaching Adam on broken shells, carefully, although Adam wanted nothing more than to hold it close again. To let its vines ring around his fingers and have a voice speak to him when he needed it most.

"Why did you wake me?" Adam asked it, sifting through the crests and troughs of the waves, short and long, a hidden message that held an answer. Images and sensations and _distance_ felt close enough to touch but big enough to make a sound if toppled.

It was a continent; it was a place. Another line sprawled somewhere, broken, somewhere far away and out of reach. The line where ocean met sky cut through him, a searing and quickly rising sun, and then it went black.

"Parrish."

A hand at his elbow squeezed. Adam turned his head, spell broken, and blinked stained sunlight from his eyes, even though it was well past midnight. Ronan stood close by his right side, an anxious furl to his brow.

"What are you doing out here?"

His expression was softened by bags under his eyes, a familiar feature on his face of late. They hadn't gotten a sound rest in days, mostly resigned to reclined car seats so they could leave at a moment's notice.

"Were you seriously scrying into the fucking ocean?" accused Ronan.

"Yes." Adam rubbed the stars from the corners of his vision, pupils trying to re-adjust to absorbing real light. "Since when do you worry about when I scry?"

"I don't. I thought you were dead. Or abducted, when I woke up and you weren't there."

He tried to make it sound bitter, but it only came out earnest. Guilt washed up inside Adam.

"No." Rubbing his eyes even more just made Ronan blurry, so he stopped, and dropped his hands. "Sorry. Cabeswater woke me up, and I didn't want to... we already get a shit amount of sleep."

Ronan tilted his head in admission, but Adam knew he should've considered how it looked. He glanced past Ronan, at the abandoned and dusty bungalow just off the shore, curtains spilling out of the wide-open backdoor. They'd both been too sick with exhaustion to keep driving, and pulled the car off the road and under an old oak tree for the night.

It was a roof over their heads. It was better than nothing.

Birds called from thinned treelines further inland, or maybe they cried, or urged. The beach had an isolated kind of white noise, the non-human kind. It was surreal, this noisy emptiness. Adan didn't quite know what state they were in and his displaced sense of self dizzied him.

"What did it want?"

Ronan had his arms tucked against his ribs, bracing himself against the relentless coastal wind. He looked at Adam like he was reassuring himself that they were both still alive.

"I don't know," Adam admitted. "Not exactly." The picture was messily formed in his mind. _You're a seed_ , the dream had said to him, _in a drought. Go to the water._

Well, he was standing in front of the water. But nothing with magic was ever that literal.

"I think it wants me to swim across the ocean," Adam said dryly, then gestured. "There's a line — the one that goes through England, where Gansey's been before. It's nearby that. It felt like it's fossilized."

"You can see that far?" Ronan asked, surprised.

Adam shrugged. "Cabeswater can. It knows all the places where it ends, and that's one of them."

It was vague enough to bother Ronan. "I thought I dreamed it to be _less_ fucking subtle."

"You can't dream the mystery out of it." Fondness exhaled along Adam's sigh, much more of it than he'd intended.

Ronan looked out over the water; not picking a point, but straight ahead, as far as he could see. Adam watched the way the blue light changed the shape of his face, moving and rearranging his features, in a way that made Adam want to hold him still. Just so he could be recognizable.

But his cheekbones had been memorized by Adam's fingertips with the attention of a mapmaker before; in return, Ronan's mouth had traveled the length his neck with the wanderlust of an explorer. They'd seen each other blush in countless different ways, laugh in even more.

Adam missed those things. The laughing, especially. Those moments were so far and few between that on some days, it seemed like a fantasy to prolong them.

"Where would it even tell you to go?" Ronan's gaze steered back to him.

"Wales," said Adam, at the same time Ronan said, "Ireland?"

Adam blinked. They were close enough to be a possibility, but the real location was still shrouded by Cabeswater's essential machinations. The suggestion coaxed a smile out of Adam, a small but toothy one. "To your roots?"

"I've never been." Adam knew this secondhand from Gansey, but he must have made a face, because Ronan said, "What? Don't assume all that rich people do is travel."

"What an awful stereotype."

"Cuts deep." Ronan put a halting hand on Adam's waist. "Do you want to go?"

"Go?" There was no offered clarification. Adam had to do it himself. "To Ireland?"

Whenever he was met with doubt, Ronan had a way of doubting himself even harder, so he took back his hand. "What?" he ground out. "That's where it's fucked, isn't it? Wasn't that the endgame Cabeswater wanted? To be whole again."

Adam thought on it, selfishly — a long time ago, he'd thought the limits of his capabilities rested in states or cities that had the word _New_ in front of their names, in bespoke suits and high thread counts, with a bank account balance that looked like a phone number, _with_ a phone number. It took time, took the unraveling of what _limits_ meant to him, to figure out that its definition was fundamentally flawed.

It took Cabeswater, and fearing that the people he loved might not live until tomorrow, and having that fear assuaged by both the normalcy of holding each other's hands, and the magic of them being saved or reborn.

The Adam of the past would have done anything to leave a good legacy behind. But what Cabeswater wanted and what he wanted were sometimes the same, and sometimes, his legacy had more to do with what he could do for others than what he could do for himself.

So he made himself rethink it, because being selfless and selfish were paradoxically not mutually exclusive. He said, "This is my bargain. It's my problem."

"Yeah, and I dreamed it again. That's on me."

"I don't — I won't leave you to chase broken ley lines to the end of the world."

"That's why," and Ronan paused, exhaling harshly and shut his mouth. He dug a hand into the pocket of his sweats, and pulled something out of it. When he uncurled his fist, open-palmed and tendons tense, Adam's heart had a full and complete second to process things before heaving. "We go together."

Adam looked and looked at it, perfectly circular and silver and impossibly hazy around the edges, like it enticed him to see what he wanted to see. What he saw was a flooded forest, fish leaping between trunks, then just Ronan's hand, then —

"An ocean between us and the rest of this bullshit could be good." Ronan was desperately trying for casual.

"You have it?" breathed Adam.

Ronan's hand shook, infinitesimally, and the light from the ring refracted at all angles. "I've had it for a while."

"I meant, you have it _now_? In the middle of the night?"

"I saw you out here." Ronan wouldn't look away. "I've carried it for, fuck, months. We haven't had a chance — Jesus, we could have died yesterday."

"On a _beach_."

"When will we ever have a goddamn chance to just —"

"In our _underwear_ —"

"When no one is looking for us, or wanting to kill us —"

"You're so fucking —"

Adam stopped, his thought unfinished, overwritten, compressed with a kiss when he pulled Ronan against him, both stopped mid-breath. Ronan inhaled through his nose, closed his eyes, and kissed him back like he was rain in a desert, a bonfire on a freezing night.

On a night like this, months ago, Ronan had whispered the idea. "I'd want to, in a church," softly rolled off his tongue, through a tight jaw. Like the confession had to be unearthed from wherever he'd buried it. And Adam imagined it, both of them under the stained glass of a cathedral, holy statues beckoning them, sharded sunlight coloring their shoulders. He imagined, an echo in his head, that he would say the words he'd been told to repeat.

But he couldn't say them yet.

He did give away something, though. Looking into Ronan's eyes across the same pillow, blankets wrapped around them and his palm covering Ronan's knuckles, he'd said, "That sounds like a dream."

A wave darted up the shore and crashed into their legs, and Ronan pulled back. Adam tried to give chase, gripping his arms and lifting his chin but Ronan breathed, "Wait," and tugged them further away from the water.

He followed. Took in air, let it out. He hated waiting when he was already done waiting.

"Let me do it right," Ronan said, and then he knelt, and Adam couldn't take it. They were on a deserted beach with no audience but there was something alive trying to break free from his crowded chest.

He held it out, flat, and Adam's fingers stuttered, wanting to go to it before the words even came out. "Marry me."

A wrenching resolution came over him, though the decision was already quietly made ages ago. To draw out the feeling, he said, "Would it kill you to ask it as a question?"

Ronan didn't care enough to deny him the satisfaction. "Will you?"

"You know," Adam said, and he hurried the rest, before his throat closed completely, "we can't just go to a courthouse right now."

And that sounded enough like what Ronan wanted to hear, so he broke into a grin. "It's symbolic, you asshole."

Adam sank to the ground in front of him, clasped his hand around Ronan's, dreamed metal pressed into their skin, and leaned into him until their brows were touching, noses against cheeks. "Yes," he said, the word barely grazing Ronan's parted mouth. "Hurry up."

He did as he was told. The ring slipped onto Adam's finger and Ronan said, "After all this time, and you're in a rush?"

 _Shut up_ shared space with _I love you_ in the things Adam was about to say, but his hands went under Ronan's shirt and his hips pressed to Ronan's and Ronan's hand slid into his hair. Words were the least important thing, the last thing on his mind when pressure from Ronan's fingers pulled them together, mouth dragging against Adam's, and Ronan pulled him sideways into the sand.

Adam's shoulder braced into it, and he laughed, rolling over. "Here?" he asked, when Ronan's mouth moved to his neck.

"Here," Ronan echoed, working his fingers past Adam's waistband and the laugh ended in a small sound Adam had made time and time again, in bedrooms and backseats of cars, under Ronan's body and under his tongue, and sometimes, with his teeth at the neck of Ronan's tattoo.

Clothes were pushed as far as they needed to go, up to shoulders and down to thighs and Adam didn't care. There was sand in his hair when he tilted his head back to breathe, and he dug his fingers into the grains when Ronan moved against him, hand between them, kissing his ear, and he didn't care about anything else.

How could he, when they could do anything together — even this.

They laid back against dry sand but Adam was underwater. Adam held onto the lighter than air feeling, in his hips, in his thighs, to his neck and at the base of his hairline where Ronan's fingers were rubbing his skin, drawing out elasticity across his heaving shoulders. He breathed into Ronan's collarbone, cheek pressed against him, eyes closed and heart thudding heavy.

"The sand was a mistake," Ronan murmured.

"But this wasn't."

Ronan brought up his palm to Adam's jaw, thumb sliding along the entire length of it. "No. You aren't."

He'd thought, in Henrietta, that his hair was formed from dust — but maybe it came from sand. He thought _he_ was formed from dust but now he wasn't light enough to be carried away on wind, or kicked up so easily by shoes. Sand fought, and dug deep, and stuck together, unshakably, when waves dove into it and tried to wrest it apart.

Adam took Ronan's hand, the weight around his ring finger a lifeline, and told himself he wouldn't let go. "When do we leave?"


End file.
